PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, FEBRUARY 2016A thick, green slick of algae floating on a lake; a troop of baboons raiding a cornfield; a tumor growing in a lymph node—one would think that these three scenes had nothing whatsoever in common.
But as I explain in my new book The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters, cancer takes various forms in the biosphere. Human tumors are formed by the uncontrolled proliferation of cells, and some ecological problems are the manifestation of the uncontrolled proliferation of some member of an ecosystem.
The analogy is easiest to grasp with algal blooms that contain astronomical numbers of the microscopic photosynthesizers. Under typical conditions, there may be just a few hundred algal cells in a liter of lake water. In a bloom, this can rocket to more than 100 million (108) cells per liter. Large blooms, such as the one that erupted on Lake Erie in 2014, can contain more than one quadrillion ...
